Tuesday, March 12, 2013

How does "Howl" rank in personal feelings versus "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "The Fish," "The Moose," "Skunk Hour," and "The Union Dead"?

If I correctly understand that you are asking about the
authors' expression of their own personal emotions through their work as opposed to
evoking the readers' personal emotion or as opposed to reporting on others' personal
emotion, then “Howl” by Ginsberg is one of the least
personally emotional--expressing the least personal authorial emotion--of the list of
poems presented by Plath, Bishop, and Lowell. In "Howl," Ginsberg is subjectively
reporting about the lives of "the best minds of [his]
generation destroyed by madness."

"Howl" is very emotional, but it is
not Ginsberg personal emotion. In this highly emotive
writing, he is untangling the fierce feeling of, as he says, "the best minds" who were
"starving hysterical." His stance, though highly empathetic and sympathetic, is
distanced and, one might say, omniscient. He tells what he perceived of them and their
experience and, in order to tell of them rightly, keeps his personal emotions
subordinate to cognitive perceptions and expressions. In other words, if we were to feel
sad for the poet’s emotional suffering or empathetic with his personal emotional
journey, we would be that much less involved and empathetic with "the best minds" who
were "destroyed by madness" ...:


readability="12">

who passed through universities with radiant
cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of
war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing
obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in
underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the
wall,



Of the other titles,
perhaps the one with the greatest authorial personal
emotion
is Lowell's "Skunk Hour" (written for Elizabeth Bishop). The
following passage lays the poet's emotional feeling bare: he feels his "mind is not
right"; he feels deep sorrow down to his very cells; he feels himself utterly isolated
as the personification of "hell":


readability="15">

… love-cars. Lights turned down,
they
lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . .
.
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love,
O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood
cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am
hell;
nobody's
here--



One that perhaps best
illuminates the emotional experience of the subject of the
poem, which is not the poet herself, is "The Fish" by Bishop. In it she uses detail that
grows to a transcendental experience with Nature when she describes how her examination
of a warrior fish, with its “medals with their ribbons,” leads to
transformation:


readability="13">

I stared and stared
and victory filled
up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where
oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer
rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their
strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow,
rainbow!


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